It has over a million and a half views on YouTube, and apparently a huge number on Facebook as well. The book's author, Craig Smith from New Zealand appears to be ecstatic about all of this (as he should be!):

Smith told the Guardian that demand had “gone through the roof” for the picture book since the video of Clark took off: in New Zealand, his publisher is “rushing to print another 50,000 copies, with a view for more”, while The Wonky Donkey is now also being reprinted in the UK. Amazon in the US and the UK has sold out, while used bookseller AbeBooks said that it has sold “hundreds of copies” of The Wonky Donkey in the last week, amid “massive demand” around the world.

[....]

“The video is gold. Watching Janice read and laugh was just delightful, and like many, her infectious laugh had me laughing too,” said Smith. “I’ve always wondered why sales had not taken off so much in the UK and US, but that looks like that’s about to change.”

According to the Associated Press, the book had sold about 75,000 copies prior to all of this (which isn't bad), though it was mostly in New Zealand and Australia, but had since gone out of print. But now, the publisher, Scholastic, was rushing to print another 600,000 copies.

According to Scholastic, the book had sold about 75,000 copies and was out of print before the video caught on last month.

"Before this fall, if you had said 'Wonky Donkey' in my store, no one would have known what you were talking about," said Linda Devlin, owner of Linda's Story Time in Monroe, Connecticut. "Now, it just sells and sells. People see it and say, 'Oh, I have to get that for my grandchildren.'"

Scholastic announced Friday that it had ordered another 600,000 copies. Meanwhile, Clark is coming to New York in November for an event at Barnes & Noble.

And, last month the book went to the top of the charts. From out of print to topping the book sale charts in just a couple of weeks is pretty incredible:

The 2009 picture book about a three-legged, one-eyed donkey has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States this fall, much of that in the past week. According to NPD BookScan, which tracks around 85 percent of the print market, "Wonky Donkey" topped all releases with more than 90,000 copies sold last week, beating out Bob Woodward's "Fear" and Rachel Hollis' "Girl, Wash Your Face," among others.

But... here's the thing. That video is almost certainly copyright infringement. It's a derivative work with the grandmother reading the entire book out loud. Obviously, neither the author nor the publisher mind that this happened. Indeed, they're pretty happy about it. And so this could just be yet another example of where copyright infringement actually ends up helping the copyright holder significantly.

But this is also an excellent example of the massive harm that the EU is about to do with Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive. Under Article 13, platforms like YouTube and Facebook would be required to block this kind of video or face massive liability. Of course, how these platforms might detect such a video is unclear. There is no form of ContentID that would see that video and know that it was infringing, but it pretty clearly is. But, once the video got so popular, with over a million views and news stories about it, sooner or later the companies would recognize that it was infringing and would be forced to take it down or face crippling liability.

All weekend long, various supporters of Article 13 have been screaming at me on Twitter about how Article 13 won't harm the internet or creators at all, and that's it's really just about "making YouTube pay its fair share." I'm curious how they could possibly explain what to do in this particular case. Under the law they want, a content creator (and tons of happy parents) would be at a loss. This book likely wouldn't be such a massive success. The companies would be forced to take that content down and to block anyone else from ever uploading it.

And what do you do if you're a smaller platform? The risk of letting just one such video through would almost certainly bankrupt you. But how is a smaller platform going to police for this kind of video that none of the copyright holders want policed? But, as a platform, Article 13 leaves them no choice.

This is one of the many problems with the approach of Article 13. It assumes, incorrectly, that all infringement is black and white obvious, and that all infringement is necessarily bad and must be stopped. It cannot take into account that those assumptions are frequently not at all accurate. It cannot take into account that this will not only cut off much of what makes the internet wonderful, but will also completely keep new entrants at bay. Google and Facebook can afford to deal with this. The next Google and Facebook won't even bother. And that would make for a pretty sad, spunky, hanky-panky, cranky, stinky, dinky, lanky, honky-tonky, winky, wonky donkey.

from the flip-to-page-45 dept

For over a decade, we have been making the point that the internet is a communications platform, not a broadcast medium. This seemingly obvious statement of fact has long been the subject of legacy content provider objections, which is part of what has led to much of the ongoing conflicts centering around intellectual property and digital business models. With big content players feeling control over their content slipping away in the internet, they have attempted to wrestle back that control by pretending the internet is something it isn't. For that reason, it's always a useful thing to point out to examples that remind people that the internet simply isn't a movie theater or television.

Two of the interactive projects currently in negotiations are based on existing video game properties, the report suggests. That seems to include the previously announced Minecraft: Story Mode, which was largely completed with the help of Telltale before that company's massive layoffs last month. Netflix has frequently said it is not interested in getting directly into the video game business, however.

It's currently unclear just how much narrative branching will be possible in these Netflix specials, or how divergent the storylines can become based on viewer interaction. Filming extra content for such branching storylines can add significantly to the production cost of traditional linear TV narratives to create content that some viewers may never end up seeing.

"Interactive" is the key word here, one which precisely shows the separation between broadcast and communications mediums. It's a small thing, it might seem, and doesn't really touch on the typical intellectual property concerns we discuss at Techdirt, but it also beautifully highlights how the internet and broadcast mediums are simply different. And, if you accept that difference, the obvious conclusion is that they should not be treated and/or regulated as though they were the same. That important distinction has an impact across the world of how the internet functions and is treated by government and the law.

In fact, this type of interactive narrative storytelling has more in common with the video game market, or even the tabletop gaming market, than television and film.

Live TV programs and game shows have long integrated interactive elements via telephone calls, webpages, and custom apps. But fully interactive narrative stories have been more closely associated with video games, from text-based stories like Zork to Hollywood-style blockbusters like Detroit: Become Human and everything in between. This narrative flexibility has also been included in video game experiments focused on filmed live-action stories, ranging from the campy Night Trap to this year's innovative WarGames reboot.

So tuck this one away for the next time you hear someone harping on about how entertainment over the internet should be treated no differently than entertainment offered via broadcast. They're not the same. And, ultimately, that's a good thing, as that dissimilarity is what allows for cool new experiments such as what Netflix is trying to create here.

A bill introduced in the New York Assembly would prohibit the state from creating any database containing aggregate surveillance data including ALPR, audio, video and facial recognition records. Passage would not only protect privacy in New York; it would also put major roadblocks in front of federal surveillance programs.

Assm.Tom Abinanti (D-Greenburgh/Mt. Pleasant), along with a bipartisan coalition of six assembly members, introduced Assembly Bill 11332 (A11332) on Sept. 19. The proposed law would bar state agencies and departments, and contractors engaged in business with the state, from using any database as a repository of, a storage system for, or a means of sharing facial recognition functionality. I would also prohibit the creation of any permanent repository or storage system for aggregate license plate reader data records, aggregate audio surveillance recordings, aggregate video surveillance images, or aggregate driver license photographs.

In effect, A11332 would prohibit the creation of any comprehensive database storing surveillance data.

It's an anti-haystack bill. And law enforcement loves its haystacks. The NYPD -- believing itself to be a globetrotting intelligence agency -- loves them more than most. Law enforcement agencies have obtained massive boosts in collection power over the years, thanks to omnipresent surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, and cheap digital storage. Biometric data has recently been added to the mix, promising to turn dumb cameras into suspect-spotting field agents.

The tech has advanced ahead of best practices or privacy impact assessments. The new hardware is presumed legal until proven otherwise and is often obtained and deployed with minimal oversight and zero public input.

This bill doesn't outlaw the continued hoovering of data points/camera footage but it does ensure the massive amount collected will have to be quickly sorted into hay and needles by restricting stored collections to stuff pertinent to ongoing investigations.

The immediate local impact would be immense. But expect the feds to start inserting themselves into local legislating. This bill would make it impossible for federal agencies to accomplish their dream of connected, nationwide databases of license plate photos and biometric data.

Because the federal government relies heavily on partnerships and information sharing with state and local law enforcement agencies, passage of A11332 would hinder the creation of federal surveillance databases. Information that is never retained by the state cannot be shared with the feds.

If the bill passes unamended, law enforcement may be able to retain more than it should by making broad claims about everything in its collections being somehow relevant to investigations. If these legislators are serious about making this law do what it says it does, they will need to tack on some reporting requirements that will force agencies to go on the record about their data retention practices.

While it's true law enforcement agencies can't possibly know what data/footage will prove useful in future investigations, that shouldn't be used as an argument for retaining everything collected. Legitimate privacy concerns should not be subordinated to New York law enforcement's fear of missing out.

from the we're-59th! dept

With net neutrality on the ropes, major U.S. carriers continue to experiment with new ways to nickel-and-dime their subscribers. One of the cornerstones of this new effort involves erecting arbitrary restrictions, then charging mobile consumers extra money to overcome them. Case in point: Sprint's attempt to charge users more money if they want to avoid arbitrary throttling of games, video, and music. Another example: Verizon's decision to throttle all video on its network to 480p unless you pay the company for a more expensive, not really "unlimited" data plan.

While carriers like to insist that they only throttle user wireless connections in cases of network congestion, a recent study explored how that wasn't remotely true. Carriers are increasingly throttling connections just to create arbitrary restrictions, and these restrictions, more often than not, have less and less to do with actual network congestion, and more and more to do with nickel-and-diming subscribers:

"There’s no evidence that any of these policies are only happening during network overload. They’re throttling video traffic even when the network doesn’t need to. It happens 24/7, and in every region where we have tests."

Another study by Open Signal released last week notes that the United States lags behind dozens of other countries in terms of quality wireless streaming. The report took a closer look at streaming performance across 69 countries, using 90 billion measurements across 8 million devices between May and August of 2018. Countries were then ranked on the quality of their "overall video experience" based on how frequently videos buffered, the resolution of the stream, and overall video load times.

The United States didn't fare very well. U.S. video quality ranked 59th in terms of overall video quality, and 34th in terms of average speeds. Not too surprisingly, the combination of slower wireless broadband speeds and arbitrary throttling and deprioritization practices carriers engage in are a major reason for the the U.S.' poor showing:

"Video experience can also be heavily impacted by operator policy. Many operators globally use video optimization technologies to restrict the level of video resolution their customers can access on their phones. As our tests sample video at different resolutions, any downgrading of video quality — say from HD to SD — would have an impact on our scores.

The U.S. is a prime example of such policies at work."

Don't forget that studies show that U.S. consumers pay significantly more money for mobile bandwidth than users in many developed markets, only to have their actual video quality still ranked terribly. For its part, Open Signal leans heavily on the carrier justification for these arbitrary limits, insisting that they're done exclusively to protect the network from congestion:

"Depending on the type of video, a 720p stream can consume twice as much or more data than a 480p stream. And as video now accounts for the majority of all mobile internet traffic, a doubling of the gross tonnage of video consumption would have a major impact on any operator's network. More traffic leads to congestion, and congestion not only impacts overall speeds available to consumers but can also lead to inconsistent connections and poorer latencies — all of which have a bearing on video experience."

But that brings us back to that recent study by Northeastern, which showed that carrier throttling of video was in no way related to congestion. Yes, carriers may be eager to tightly restrict video to prevent traffic from being greater to save money, but that may not necessarily mean they're responding to congestion. As made clear above, most carriers are very interested in erecting artificial tiers of service, where you have to pay more money for a stream to work as the sender originally intended. That's less to do with congestion, and more to do with trying to make even more money off of American consumers.

With net neutrality dead and federal consumer protection taking a nice long vacation, you're going to see a hell of a lot more of that type of behavior if the mega-ISPs and the FCC win the looming lawsuit filed by 23 State Attorneys General.

from the just-the-beginning dept

Last week we noted how Comcast had imposed new limits on its shiny new "unlimited" wireless plans. The company informed users of its Xfinity Wireless service that moving forward, all video on the service would be throttled back to 480p, with plans to begin charging you more if you want to watch your video in full HD quality. As we noted then, this was just a continuation of a theme already established by wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint, which involved imposing arbitrary throttling thresholds for games, music and video, then charging you additional money to get around those bogus limitations.

It shouldn't be particularly hard to see how imposing arbitrary limits that impede your ability to experience content as the originators intended sets a terrible precedent. And should the FCC's net neutrality repeal survive its looming legal challenge, you're going to see wireless carriers and ISPs slowly embrace more and more of this sort of thing, at least once they know for sure that the government has zero interest in actually policing such "creative" abuse of a broken market. What we're seeing now is just the orchestra getting warmed up.

Following on the heels of Comcast, Charter has launched its own wireless service offering that also promises users "unlimited" connectivity. But like Comcast's offering, Charter's service will also throttle all video to 480p. The company's Spectrum Mobile website explains how the industry's definition of "unlimited data" still leaves a little something to be desired:

"After 20 GB per line, you may experience reduced speeds for the rest of the bill cycle.

There are no additional fees for using your phone as a mobile hotspot. After 5 GB of mobile hotspot data use in the bill cycle, mobile hotspot speeds are reduced to a maximum of 600 kbps for the rest of the bill cycle. Mobile hotspot data counts toward your 20 GB high-speed data allowance. Remember, your laptop may consume more data than your phone would for similar activities.

As Sprint and T-Mobile try to sell regulators on their job and competition-eroding megamerger, one of their core justifications for the deal is that the reduction in total overall competitors from four to three is no big deal because cable operators are tinkering with wireless mitigating any real fallout. But that ignores a few things. Like the fact that T-Mobile's CEO previously laughed off these services as irrelevant and destined to fail. Or that Comcast and Charter lean on Verizon Wireless' network for backup, reducing their incentive to disrupt Verizon. And they've struck a deal that involves agreeing not to compete with each other.

As a result, Charter and Comcast's wireless plans are almost mirror images of one another, including the middle finger at net neutrality (aka your right to enjoy content as intended by the service you're subscribing to without your ISP injecting itself in the process to make an additional buck).

For now, Charter isn't charging you more to watch videos in actual HD, but you can be pretty certain that's coming down the road. With ISPs wary of the looming net neutrality court challenge, they're trying desperately to remain on their best behavior. As such, you're going to see very glacial moves toward tighter restrictions as these companies try to cash in on the one-two punch of limited competition and napping regulators like Ajit Pai. Initially -- like being unable to watch HD video on your phone -- they won't seem like the end of the world, but cumulatively and over time, you can be damn well assured it's going to hurt.

At the heart of the effort was Verizon's Go90 streaming video service. Launched in 2015 alongside mountains of hype, the Millennial-focused effort avoided using Verizon's brand name for obvious reasons. Unfortunately for Verizon, the service was quickly and repeatedly derided as "a dud" by Verizon's own media partners. In just a few years the effort saw repeated layoffs, and despite several efforts to bring in top talent and relaunch the service, the company this week finally acknowledged that the service will be headed out to pasture:

"Following the creation of Oath, go90 will be discontinued,” a company spokeswoman said in an email. “Verizon will focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news and entertainment for today’s mobile consumers and tomorrow’s 5G applications.”

Representatives of go90 have begun informing content providers about plans to end both the go90 brand and the video streaming app by July 31, online magazine Digiday reported earlier on Thursday citing four sources familiar with the situation.
It said go90 will return shows and content rights back to its production partners. Verizon has spent about $1.2 billion on Go90 since its 2015 launch, Digiday reported, citing two sources.

Needless to say, a generation of being a government-pampered telecom monopoly left Verizon ill-prepared for its marketing and media gambit, and the company's own incompetence and lack of innovative DNA have made for rough sledding early on. The company's history is now littered with failed efforts to actually be innovative and disruptive, including the Verizon app store, its video joint venture with RedBox, and numerous other "me too" initiatives under the discontinued VCAST brand.

Verizon's struggles with head to head competition explains why the company consistently feels the need to tilt the playing field unfairly in its favor, as the company's decade-long attack on net neutrality makes painfully clear.

from the what-the-fuck-twitter? dept

It is something of an unfortunate Techdirt tradition that every time the Olympics rolls around, we are alerted to some more nonsense by the organizations that put on the event -- mainly the International Olympic Committee (IOC) -- going out of their way to be completely censorial in the most obnoxious ways possible. And, even worse, watching as various governments and organizations bend to the IOC's will on no legal basis at all. In the past, this has included the IOC's ridiculous insistence on extra trademark rights that are not based on any actual laws. But, in the age of social media it's gotten even worse. The Olympics and Twitter have a very questionable relationship as the company Twitter has been all too willing to censor content on behalf of the Olympics, while the Olympic committees, such as the USOC, continue to believe merely mentioning the Olympics is magically trademark infringement.

So, it's only fitting that my first alert to the news that the Olympics are happening again was hearing how Washington Post reporter Ann Fifield, who covers North Korea for the paper, had her video of the unified Korean team taken off Twitter based on a bogus complaint by the IOC:

And Twitter complied even though the takedown is clearly bogus. Notice Fifield says that it is her video? The IOC has no copyright claim at all in the video, yet they filed a DMCA takedown over it. The copyright is not the IOC's and therefore the takedown is a form of copyfraud. Twitter should never have complied and shame on the company for doing so. Even more ridiculous: Twitter itself is running around telling people to "follow the Olympics on Twitter." Well, you know, more people might do that if you weren't taking down reporters' coverage of those very same Olympics.

Oh, and it appears that Facebook is even worse. They're pre-blocking the uploads of such videos:

This is fucked up and both the IOC and Facebook should be ashamed. The IOC can create rules for reporters and can expel them from the stadium if they break those rules, but there is simply no legal basis for them to demand such content be taken off social media, and Twitter and Facebook shouldn't help the IOC censor reporters.

from the really.--everyone.-stop-it. dept

This is one of those frustrating stories where basically everyone's wrong about everything. Here's how it started: Just prior to Ajit Pai's FCC officially dumping net neutrality rules last week, the Daily Caller released a video with Pai. Pai seems to have a way of not realizing just how incredibly unfunny, tone-deaf and cringeworthy his "jokes" are -- but it doesn't stop him from trying again. If you somehow missed it, you can see the video here:

The video is bad and dumb and misleading and, yes, very, very cringeworthy. The pure awfulness of the video is what got people worked up initially, with Pai's supporters gleefully laughing at Pai's opponents for getting upset about it. If you can't see it for some reason, it involves Pai claiming that nothing is going to change on the internet following his bad decision to kill the FCC's net neutrality rules, and then attempts to show some examples: posting images of food and dogs to the internet, doing some online shopping, being a dorky Star Wars fan and, finally, "ruining a meme."

That meme? The Harlem Shake. If you were online in 2013, you almost certainly remember it. Because it was everywhere. For a couple months or so, everyone on the internet seemed to feel it was their obligation to create a video showing people crazy dancing to a snippet of the song "Harlem Shake" by "Baauer" the stage name of a music producer named Harry Rodrigues. The song, the Harlem Shake uses a sample from another song, Miller Time, by Philadelphia's Plastic Little. Also, the "con los terroristas" line was sampled from a singer named Hector Delgado.

Back in 2013, we actually had a few stories about copyright issues around the whole Harlem Shake phenomenon. First, we noted that Baauer and his label, Mad Decent, seemed to have engaged in selective enforcement of whatever copyright they might have held on the song. They left most videos live on, but did take down some from people they disagreed with. We also noted that the whole meme went viral not for anything that Baauer actually did, but because of the first few videomakers whose crazy videos turned it into a thing. Finally, we noted that Delgado and Plastic Little were demanding their cut as well.

And, of course, we should note that the whole Harlem Shake meme came and went pretty fast. I mean days after it went big, it was already declared dead. And, yes, this was part of the lame Pai joke.

Onto outrage two: soon after everyone was complaining about how awful (and inappropriate) this video was, some people noticed that one of the women dancing in the Ajit Pai Harlem Shake video... was a conspiracy theorist Pizzagater. Which, you know, is not really a good look for the freaking Chairman of the FCC (especially while making fun of people who are concerned about the future of the internet).

Outrage three: we're back to copyright. Baauer tweeted angrily that he supported net neutrality and was "taking action" saying "whatever I can do to stop this loser."

"The use of my song in this video obviously comes as a surprise to me as it was just brought to my attention. I want to be clear that it was used completely without my consent or council. My team and I are currently exploring every single avenue available to get it taken down. I support Net Neutrality like the vast majority of this country and am appalled to be associated with its repeal in anyway."

So, let's be clear why this is also bad. The use here is obviously fair use. In the past we argued that all of the Harlem Shake videos were likely fair use, but the case with the Pai video is even stronger. It's clearly a parody in making fun of the song's use in the old dead meme, and parody is non-infringing as fair use. If there was a lawsuit, Pai/FCC/Daily Caller would win. Furthermore, it appears that Baauer is basically trying to assert a sort of "moral" right into copyright that doesn't exist under US law. Moral rights, which are available in other countries (and only on limited works in the US -- but not music) allow an artist to block an otherwise legal usage by saying they don't want to be associated with it. But not in the US.

Indeed, Baauer seems to be admitting his intent to misuse copyright to silence speech he doesn't like. That's bad. Even if I agree that Pai's video is awful and his effort to destroy net neutrality is terrible, that still doesn't make it right to abuse copyright law to silence speech.

But... that didn't stop Baauer's label, Mad Decent, from going ahead and issuing a takedown and promising to sue if the video was not removed:

Official statement re the use of "Harlem Shake" in Daily Caller's video of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: neither Mad Decent nor Baauer approved this use nor do we approve of the message contained therein. We have issued a takedown will pursue further legal action if it is not removed.

And, indeed, as with basically any YouTube takedown, the company took the video down:

There were many people who are quite rightly upset at Pai's killing of net neutrality who then quite wrongly cheered on this takedown. It may be fun to see someone you dislike have their speech silenced through abusive copyright takedowns, but that doesn't make it any less wrong. No matter how much you disagree with Pai (and we disagree with him around here quite a lot), pulling down his video over a copyright claim is clearly bad.

And that takes us to outrage four: The Daily Caller then totally flips its lid with laughable conspiracy theories about how YouTube only took the video down because Google supports net neutrality and wanted to silence Ajit Pai.

YouTube’s targeting of Daily Caller content and its willingness to remove our video for political purposes while millions of other uses are allowed to remain on the platform should stand as a terrifying prospect for every American.

Except that's ridiculous. YouTube takes down tons of videos when it receives a DMCA notice. Indeed, the web is filled with examples of YouTube taking down videos that should be protected by fair use. That's why users can counterclaim and say that it's fair use. And YouTube is pretty good about responding to such fair use counterclaims and getting the video back up. Which is what happened here. But, the Daily Caller insists the video only was put back up because it's big and has lots of influence (feel free to debate both of those points if you'd like).

There's still a possible future outrage: if Mad Decent and/or Baauer actually sue over it, which hopefully any reasonable lawyer will talk them out of doing.

So, again, everyone and everything in this story is awful. Pai's video is dumb, misleading, cringeworthy and awful. Pai's actions around net neutrality are awful. Pai cavorting with a conspiracy theorist is awful. Baauer and Mad Decent freaking out over obvious fair use of their song is awful. Mad Decent issuing a bullshit takedown is awful. YouTube complying with the takedown is awful. And the Daily Caller stupidly assuming the compliance with the takedown is for political reasons, rather than standard operating procedure for DMCA takedowns is awful.

In short: it's all awful. Horribly awful.

The FCC shouldn't be killing net neutrality. The chairman of the FCC shouldn't be making awful, misleading videos with nutty conspiracy theorists mocking the vast majority of the American public who disagree with his stupid plan. And he shouldn't include four year old memes, even if it's to parody old memes, because, really, let the fucking memes die. The people who got rich off the memes shouldn't then abuse copyright law to try to censor speech they don't like. And the people who made the stupid, awful video in the first place, shouldn't leap to laughable conclusions about why their video got taken down.

And I feel like I should end this post with "... and get off my lawn," though I'd much prefer that we live in a world where we weren't having competing narratives over censorship, where the internet remained open and free and non-discriminatory, and bogus copyright takedowns didn't take down expressive content, no matter how dumb it might be. Tragically, we're not there yet.

from the you-don't-say dept

When it comes to offering good legal alternatives to piracy in the entertainment industry, there are two types of arguments people make. One is that these alternatives, if properly done, will reduce the rate of piracy within a population set. The other is that these streaming options are great revenue sources regardless of the impact on piracy within the population and that increased revenues are all that really matter. What virtually nobody has argued is that if a streaming service barely gives people anything they want, even if that service is free, that piracy will cease to be.

The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand.

To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect.

Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn’t change significantly.

This summary sounds quite damning, particularly for those that would argue that good legal alternatives can reduce piracy. In this case, a free temporary subscription to a streaming service barely had an impact at all. The researchers found that overall TV consumption went up a few points and reduced torrenting practices by a few points. Neither change was a significant one. So what gives?

The video-on-demand service in the study had an average “fit” of just 12% with people’s viewing preferences, which means that they were missing a lot of content. But even Netflix, which has a library of thousands of titles, only has a fit of roughly 50%.

Right, except 50% is a fairly big jump from 12%. Even accounting for the gifted streaming service being free and Netflix carrying a cost, a streaming service that has 12% of what a consumer wants is only barely discernible from useless. The power of Netflix is in how much content it has and, by virtue of its quantity, how much the average person will find on the service that matches their tastes. What this is actually showing is how much damage is done by content providers cutting exclusive deals with streaming services and fragmenting what could otherwise be one-stop streaming services. The real question is what happens when a streaming service actually has the content people want. It's a question this same study actually answers.

“Households with preferences aligned with the gifted content reduced their probability of using BitTorrent during the experiment by 18% and decreased their amount of upload traffic by 45%,” the paper reads.

A nearly 20% reduction in torrent behavior over this short a sample period is really good. It's so good, in fact, that it should be the feature outcome of this study. A streaming platform that is strong on the content people want can cut piracy by a fifth in forty-five days. How is that not the headline?

The rest of the study makes much of how little the pirate households said they'd be willing to pay for a streaming service like Netflix, something like $3/month. This is presented as evidence again in refuting a claim that nobody made: piracy won't magically go away just because there's a good streaming service. But all this result really shows is that these people were never going to be reasonable targets for customership to begin with. Netflix has had a huge adoption rate where available and its been another pure revenue stream for content creators. Who cares what the habits of a bunch of people who can't even manage to pay $3/month for Netflix are? They aren't important. Or, at least, they can't be nearly as important as all of the people who are paying their Netflix subscriptions, resulting in revenue for content creators.

So, will good legal alternatives pop up to reduce piracy? Probably, if they're done well. Will they ever stamp out piracy completely? Nope. Does that matter? Not if the only focus is on making content creators more money, because the focus in that regard should be on making streaming options as successful as possible, which is not what the content companies are doing.

from the you're-welcome dept

Back in February you might recall that a little something called competition forced Verizon Wireless to bring back unlimited data plans it had spent the last few years insisting nobody really wanted. But the plans nobody wanted or needed wound up being so immensely popular, they caused some very modest slowdowns on the Verizon network. As a result, Verizon announced last August that it was getting rid of its truly unlimited plan, and replacing it with a series of even worse "unlimited" plans that throttled every video touching the Verizon network. For good measure, Verizon proceeded to ban 4K video streaming entirely.

Fast forward a few months, and Verizon has now introduced a new "solution" to the company's own caveats. Starting on November 3, Verizon will be graciously allowing you to pay them an additional $10 per month to lift these arbitrary and artificial restrictions:

"The company said on Wednesday that it would offer the option for consumers to stream 4K quality video -- if they're willing to pay $10 extra a month. The option becomes available on Nov. 3.

The nation's largest wireless carrier by customers walked back its move from two months ago, when it introduced several new variants of its unlimited data offering -- but restricted video to only 720p quality. The cheapest version of the plan reduced video down to DVD quality. The carrier faced backlash from some consumers who complained about the quality cap.

Charging you more money to obtain the truly unlimited connection you used to enjoy has become pretty standard procedure. In 2016, Sprint began throttling video, games and music unless users paid them an additional fee. The vagueness of our existing net neutrality rules opened the door to this kind of behavior, and once the FCC belatedly began realizing these kinds of arbitrary limitations could be used anti-competitively late last year, Trump and FCC boss Ajit Pai had arrived on the scene, eager to gut net neutrality rules entirely.

The problem is that once you open the door to carriers building arbitrary restrictions as to what you can do on the network -- and charging you arbitrary fees to get around them -- it will never stop. Investors demand their improved quarterly returns, and the pressure will be unyielding to use these kinds of arbitrary restrictions to nickel and dime consumers in perpetuity. And with the looming Sprint T-Mobile merger reducing sector competition, and the Trump administration acting as little more than a mindless rubber stamp for the interests of the sector's biggest carriers, there's not going to be a whole lot in place to stop it.